Hotei

Where to start with Hotei? Well with more than 40 million records sold in Japan, he needs no introduction there and to the cineaste Battle Without Honour or Humanity will be familiar from Taratino’s Kill Bill Vol 1 (and closes this album). There’s also various collaborations and side projects that have kept him busy since the 1980s. But curiously quite a low profile in the UK.

So what we have here is his international debut and it’s a smorgasbord of riffs and styles. You want proggy almost disturbing instrumental with a touch of the film soundtrack, take Medusa. Fancy a more metallic stomp there’s How The Cookie Crumbles featuring Iggy Pop. On a more industrial note there’s Move It but then he’s got Rammstein involved here.

The album is incredibly slick all the way through from production to performance, and there is a kind of metronomic pulse to it. Yet it doesn’t feel overly buffed. The haunting Barrel Of My Own Gun has a certain grittiness while the other Iggy feature Walking Through The Night is one heavy mother. At the other end there’s Into The Light, a sort of Twin Peaks Badalamenti meditation.

There’s no doubt that Hotei is nimble fingered on guitar and while it’s technically probably up with the best, it’s maybe not easily distinguishable from other techno players. As an introduction to the music of Hotei this is fine, time to check out the back catalogue.